10 Awesome Movies With Awful Special Effects

9. The Terminator

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KeniFoiT-0 The Terminator is one of my favourite films, but I do have to concede that the special effects have aged horribly, even if the designs themselves from late special effects whizz Stan Winston are excellent and superbly iconic. The relatively low budget of the film meant that director James Cameron and Winston had to get creative with their effects; scenes such as Arnold's cyborg removing his damaged eyeball are laughable by today's standard, though for me the scene that suffers the most is the chase through the Cyberdyne factory at the end of the film. There's one shot in particular - viewable at around 0:16 in the above clip - which features the T-8000 walking along a hallway towards a door, and it's the most rudimentary, garish (presumably stop-motion) effect imaginable, totally taking viewers out of what is going on. Sure, the stilted robotic walk sort of works and is definitely creepy, but the low frame-rate looks cheesy and unintentionally funny. Thankfully, the rest of the scene is so taut - thanks to Cameron mostly sticking to close-ups of a robot puppet - that it is able to recover.